Many people could buy a Prius or Volt or a new Ford Fiesta or other similar cars over the next 10 years and we could cut our oil consumption for driving in half or likely more.

I don't think there is any way your assertion will come true. Can you walk us through the math you are using?

Here is a comment I made a few days back:

That said, the real-world impact of EVs is this: not much.

In the U.S., auto sales have nudged up to just under 11 million sales per year. Pretty much none of those are EVs. The Volt is starting with 10,000 per year and the Nissan Leaf with 25,000 per year — peanuts, really. This projection puts EV sales at 400,000 annually by 2020. However, even that number is too high because they haven't banked on a depression occurring between then and now, which will cause sales of all goods and services to decline — especially high-ticket items like cars. I wouldn't be surprised if auto sales in the U.S. decline to 3-5 million per year.

It's a similar thing with hybrids, which currently make up at best 3% of annual sales. As the economy contracts from higher oil prices, sales will go down, precisely what happened in 2008.

In other words, I can't see how your scenario can possibly occur.

Huge efficiencies could be realized...with the proper price signals.

Amen to that!

We just returned from my sister's wedding in Italy and got to see, once again, how people can lead very enviable lifestyles on a fraction of the energy consumed by the typical American.

Given our current infrastructure, the transition to a lower energy lifestyle will involve hard choices and economic setbacks for some. But there is no question that we can still lead a first world lifestyle on half the Joules we presently consume. Just look to the apartment dwelling 30-somethings of Seattle and Portland for a sense of the generational shift that is coming.

Best Hopes for an improved lifestyle that involves less consumption.

Jon

Many people could buy a Prius or Volt or a new Ford Fiesta or other similar cars over the next 10 years and we could cut our oil consumption for driving in half or likely more.

You really got to do the number crunching right. You can't get more than around 20% by 2020:

19/6/2010
Primary Energy Dilemma for cars
http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=1631

Interesting film on Lithium in Bolivia:

http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2010/s2965757.htm

They say "Lithium is the next oil" (!!!)

Salar de Uyuni
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni

6/1/2010
Diminishing Returns of Fossil Fuel Energy Invested
http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=909

If anyone thinks there will be enough money for car loans, read this interview with Joseph Stiglitz

Troubles ahead for world economy
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2965891.htm#

Jevon's paradox applies on a global scale...increased fuel efficiency in the OECD will only drive increased car sales in places like China and India...

Many people could buy a Prius or Volt or a new Ford Fiesta or other similar cars over the next 10 years and we could cut our oil consumption for driving in half or likely more.

Well no doubt car efficiencies WILL have to improve. Very doubtful about the accuracy of that particular projection - we have a Prius and thereby went from maybe 28 mpg American to around 42. Hardly cutting consumption in half. Also never understand how electric cars are calculated to be so much more efficient since the efficiency of generation-distribution-transforming-charging-discharging-electric motor efficiency appears to be considerably less than the efficiency of a modern internal combustion engine.
A lot of the increasing efficiency of cars is due to lighter weight - that does not apply to trucks, what proportion of transportation energy do they represent ?

We should certainly look for a lot of the decreased consumption in settlement patterns and cultural shifts. More transit, less single person commuting. I have the impression that a high proportion of foreclosures are in the further flung suburbs with less services, but that may be just my prejudiced lens.

"We have only two modes - complacency and panic." — James R. Schlesinger, the first U.S. Dept. of Energy secretary

We have an amazing capacity to do the wrong thing.

Donella Meadows (LTG) gives quite a lot of insight how humans have the capacity to push things the wrong way under stress, BAU mode.
http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf

Humans struggle in systems thinking. We think we’re intuitive but under a lot of conditions we're not, anything with latency, hysteresis and delayed feedback. Why so many economists are crap at forecasting.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahnemann-le...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dddFfRaBPqg

Gail gets criticised a lot because she generally a systems thinker and has the capacity to see that the finance system is immediate hurdle, our predominanting economics view is inconsistent with reality.

Is T. Boone Pickens still alive? It appears his plan still is. What happened? I swear it seemed like the price of oil was dropped to kill his idea.

I hope you are including the cost of running all those new natural gas pipes. Gas service is not available to my home. The existing gas lines don't have the capacity to supply what you intend to use. And you can't ship it by tank truck, unless it's cryogenic, and that's not easy either.

Now, it you process the gas into propane. then liquid transport and small tank storage get easier. If you look in the antique tractor web sites, there used to be a significant number of LPG tractors.

Or you could convert the gas to methanol. That would also work.

Switching to a natural gas infrastructure would be far easier than any of the other possibilities generally mentioned (solar, wind, nuclear) and would take less than 40 years.

Maybe you should watch the movie 'Gasland' before jumping to that conclusion. Even though it's a documentary, it feels like a sci-fi B type movie of people getting sick and some dying from tainted water from fracking to get more natural gas out of the ground. Faucets that light up to a match. Rivers of death for the animals. Is BAU really worth ruining fresh water sources?

> Nuclear has the problem of waste

Seriously? Compared to what? Coal/oil/gas? How many poeple did spent fuel killed over 50 years or so we produce it? None. Carbon fuel wastes are ventilated to the shared atmosphere via the convenient feature of "smokestacks". They kill somewhere between 1-2 million people a year, according to WHO.

Nuclear power is the only exajoule scale energy source which actually can & does isolate its wastes.

The upper bounds of coal use are set by atmospheric laws

I only wish that were true. But the only atmospheric law limiting FF use is oxygen content, which is more than enough to burn all the FF (Unless we figure out how to mine&oxidize the Iron in the earths core). Now the consequences of burning too much may be severe, but they are deniable. So the only constrainsts (other than geological) will have to be imposed by human political action.

Your statement could be recast as "the only SANE bounds on coal use...".

Why would a far gone drunk with enough money to stay drunk and happy( or at least numb) quit drinking simply because his liver is shot, in order to live a hard miserable life , short of money, probably in pain, perhaps even cold and hungry?(Or in Australia, hot and thirsty?)

In such circumstances I would almost certainly opt to keep on drinking, live on the proceeds of my excess hooch, and take my chances on dying sooner.

Australia may opt to keep on burning and selling coal;certainly there will be buyers in desperate enough straits to keep on buying it.

If you don't survive next year, you can't survive the decade that follows.

People and countries may do anything within thier power when pushed hard enough by circumstances.

While you are at it, why not mention the following:

1- Europe had the coldest winter since 1964 in 2009/10 http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-06/coal-discount-to-winter-u-k-...

2- South America is experiencing the coldest winter in many decades http://theweatherspace.com/article/Weather_News/Worldwide_Weather/Danger...

Here is some more:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7908604/...

Moscow had its coldest winter for decades.

I'm right there with you on that post, Antoinetta the third. Not sure of the timing either, but certainly see that once

A year or so after that, the shortages will have created such economic chaos, that BAU on any large scale will totally collapse.

Once a certain degree of collapse has occurred, the integration of civilizations complexity will have suffered such an infrastructural, distributional, foreclosureal, loss of credit, debt boom and unemployment blow, that no flim-flam attempt at borrowing trillions will resurrect BAU. Essentially the broken system will reach a point of failure to feed the masses and that will end the age of oil.

All this conjecture of NG replacing oil is wishful thinking at best. The dip from plateau will occur long before any concerted effort to switch the whole thing over from oil based transport can occur. Society will in hindsight pay an enormous price for failing to heed the warnings of a peak in oil production and its predicted consequences on the economy.

Are you familiar with numbers published by Rogner, 1997 or 1998 if I recall correctly? I can find the reference if you aren't familiar with it.

Have you read any of the Limits to Growth books? Just asking because you seem to be repeating some common misconceptions. Perhaps you have just read the critiques and not the original source?

Matt Simmons also had a very good review of both Limits to Growth and its critiques. You can find it here, it is very informative.

http://greatchange.org/ov-simmons,club_of_rome_revisted.html

"(...)
WHAT THE LIMITS TO GROWTH ACTUALLY SAID

After reading The Limits to Growth, I was amazed. Nowhere in the book was there any mention about running out of anything by 2000. Instead, the book's concern was entirely focused on what the world might look like 100 years later. There was not one sentence or even a single word written about an oil shortage, or limit to any specific resource, by the year 2000.

The members of the "Club or Rome" were also not a mysterious, sinister, anonymous group of doomsayers. Rather, they were a group of 30 thoughtful, public spirited-intellects from ten different countries. The group included scientists, economists, educators, and industrialists. They met at the instigation of Dr. Aurelia Peccei, an Italian industrialist affiliated with Fiat and Olivetti.

The group all shared a common concern that mankind faced a future predicament of grave complexity, caused by a series of interrelated problems that traditional institutions and policy would not be able to cope with the issues, let alone come to grips with their full context. A core thesis of their work was that long term exponential growth was easy to overlook. Human nature leads people to innocently presume growth rates are linear. The book then postulated that if a continuation of the exponential growth of the seventies began in the world's population, its industrial output, agricultural and natural resource consumption and the pollution produced by all of the above, would result in severe constraints on all known global resources by 2050 to 2070.

The genesis of this book was a series of early meetings being held by The Club of Rome in 1968. These meetings culminated in a decision to initiate a remarkably ambitious undertaking. The task was to examine the complex problems troubling "men of all nations; poverty in the midst of plenty, degradation of the environment, loss of faith in institutions, uncontrolled urban spread, etc."

"Phase One" of the project of the predicament of mankind took shape in 1970. The group commissioned a team of Economic Modelers at MIT to forecast, in approximate terms, what pressures the globe would undergo if the current growth trends continued for another 100 years. This research was financed by the Volkswagen Foundation.

At the time, the technique of conducting computer based integrated modeling was quite new. The technique was called "System Dynamics", where various inter-related elements and positive and negative feedback loops influence the various ingredients and outputs of the model.

The initial results of this modeling work were sufficiently alarming that Club of Rome participants decided to publish them, and call the book The Limits to Growth. The book was published by Potomac Associates, a non-partisan research and analysis organization seeking to encourage lively inquiry into critical issues of public policy.

The book painstakingly acknowledged that the model's work was still "preliminary." Much more detailed analysis was needed to hone in on the issues this model raised. The decision to publish the results, as rough as they were, was driven by a desire to quickly get the issues into the public domain. This would hopefully command critical attention to the work and spark debate in all societies about the changes needed to avoid the catastrophic elements that the model indicated would occur by 2070, absent any changes.

While many readers concocted various "imaginary" assumptions, the book's conclusions were quite simple. The first conclusion was a view that if present growth trends continued unchanged, a limit to the growth that our planet has enjoyed would be reached sometime within the next 100 years. This would then result in a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

The second key conclusion was that these growth trends could be altered. Moreover, if proper alterations were made, the world could establish a condition of "ecological stability" that would be sustainable far into the future.

The third conclusion was a view that the world could embark on this second path, but the sooner this effort started, the greater the chance would be of achieving this "ecologically stable" success.

The book, in its entirety, is beautifully written. It takes only a few hours to read. I would highly recommend it to anyone. It is an interesting mixture of simple, tried and true economic laws, combined with a terrific dose of logic. Without a doubt, there are some serious doomsday elements laid out which our world would face if the conclusions of this modeling work were ignored, and key trends continue to rise at exponential vs. linear rates. But, the book essentially lays out an optimistic outlook on how easily these limits to growth can be altered if a real effort to accomplish this is made at an early stage, rather than attempting such changes too late.

The most amazing aspect of the book is how accurate many of the basic trend extrapolation worries which ultimately give raise to the limits this book expresses still are, some 30 years later. In fact, for a work that has been derisively attacked by so many energy economists, a group whose own forecasting record has not stood the test of time very well, there was nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely invalidated. To the contrary, the chilling warnings of how powerful exponential growth rate can be are right on track. The thesis that it is easy to misjudge this type of growth has also been proven by the volumes of misguided criticism that the report engendered.

The world is now 30 years into this 100-year view. It did grow as fast as the book warned. The gap between rich and poor never narrowed. Instead, the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" grew by a significant measure. It is interesting to contemplate how horrified the book's authors would be today, given the population trends that happened post 1972. The current strain on many of our precious resources is already becoming serious. It would have been far worse by 2000, given the rate of expansion which happened to the world's poor population, had these people also begun to significantly improve their standard of living at the same time. An accidental safety valve for many potentially scarce resources turned out to be the widening of the rich/poor gap.

(...)"

Shoot - that makes 3 typos found since printing it.

Mohr's mean still higher than USGS 2000 at 2.35 trillion barrels(13412 XJ/5.7 GJ per barrel) of conventional oil versus 2.273 trillion by USGS.

USGS 2000 is considered quite high by many at TOD for conventional oil.
Really we shouldn't see a peak until past 2030 with that much oil.

Mohr thinks we will develop a lot of unconventional oil under his 'middle' scenario.

I think the USGS is due with a new assessment this year--should be interesting.
This will also be interesting as it will show how many G tons of CO2 will result from burning all that lovely fuel.
It would total to over 4000 Gt of CO2 but today we only put 30 Gt CO2 into the atmosphere per year.
The atmosphere today holds 3000 Gt of CO2 so emitting all that carbon should put us uncomfortably above 750 ppm CO2(we are at 380 ppm now).

It's an amazing amount of hydrocarbons.

Peak Oil?
Fuggetaboutit!

I certainly do, and he is dead bang on right.

I was struck by how similar, with the exception of unconventional gas, the peaks of these models were to the ones developed by de Sousa and Mearns in Olduvai Revisited.

we had better have the wisdom not to use on earth.

The choices we have are not between good and evil but between evil and worse evil.
Between a trajectory that may lead to the extermination of all life on earth and one that may lead to banishment into deep space.

If we are lethally toxic to life on our mother planet, is it not our moral responsibility to remove ourselves?
I suspect that this is the choice of every nascent intelligence on all the 100 million life giving planets extrapolated from recent data from the Kepler space telescope.

If we have the answer and refuse to implement it, then we have to ask hard questions of our motivations.
Why do we insist on death?

It is too late to put the gene back into the bottle.
We may yearn for the innocence of our childhood, but the days when Mommy Nature fed our mouths and wiped our bottoms are over.

A-freakin'-men!

You sound like a potential convert to the plain life. Come to Lancaster County PA and live in the 19th century. Farm land is expensive when you can buy it so bring lots of money. Nothing good comes cheap.

Ray Kurzweil types

Sitting on our hands and waiting for Kurzweiller's Singularity is not wise.
Hope is not a Battle Plan.

As far as downloading our brains into a computer, isn't that we are doing now, using a keyboard and clumsy English?

By the way, a potential solution to the interface problem is demonstrated here.

But we are wondering off topic.
What I see in the graphs are peaks, not solutions.

The problems have received plenty of air, what we need are solutions.
And so I offer O'Neils plan as the best candidate.

I have an even better idea: How about we send up into space all the robots, and all the machines, and all the pollution, and all the manufacturing, and all of the Ray Kurzweil types who want to download their brains into computers. Then leave those of us alone who are quite content to be human and to live with the human bodies and the natural environment that we evolved in and are adapted to.

We are in agreement.
Can We trust you with the stewardship of the planet?

I've had this argument with Euan & others here more than once - and I will bang the table once again for a standardization of units!

In private correspondence with me last month, Yooon actually argued for EJs:
"I think to be correct we should use EJs - based on energy required to move given mass given distance. BTUs / quads is thermal based and difficult to relate to any standard."

Which is a good point. In any case, I don't like volumetric or weight measurements. I think ideally it would be a heat unit. However, with the push toward RE and PHEVs and so on, perhaps Wh is the best unit. We have to get away from MPG measures in vehicles. Wh seems the most universal & appropriate unit going forward.

But for now, I say stick with EJs (or quads) and wait for the geology fuddy-duddies with their old mtoe units to catch up. ;-)

To end on a more helpful note, here's a good bookmark: an Energy Conversion Calculator from Hess. Probably the most useful and comprehensive such online tool I've seen.

SMohr,I wasn't referring to the source of funding.I was referring to the culture which probably exists in your university,to some extent,at least.And that sort of BAU,growth at any cost culture exists in a lot of academia right across Australia.You may have come across it.So I am not especially singling out Newcastle or you although my comment may have read like that.

My apologies if you took my comments personally.Best wishes for future (unbiased) investigations.

I refute any allegation of bias most strongly.

Good for you. But don't worry about this crowd too much, there are those here who would accuse the Pope himself of being a satanist if he didn't instantly agree with whatever todays groupthink might be.

Nah, he's 'University of Newcastle in Australia'. Neecassel Broone* is from Newcastle upon Tyne UK, Geordie Land (do not confuse with Newcastle-under-Lyme or Newcastle Emlyn) .

NAOM

*Newcastle Brown Ale For English speakers.

Hi Steve,

I didn't realize that there is a recovery factor which needs to be applied to those numbers. Thanks for the clarification.

Most people aren't familiar with the difference. So the fundamental source for your numbers is Rogners work then?

The German Empire is geographic region of modern Germany and Poland, the problem is that coal production statistics that should be grouped with Poland are grouped into Germany in pre 1914 statistics.

Hmmm...

I gather you did enough research to get this right, but...

You do know that almost half of Poland today was part of Germany until 1945?
And, perhaps more importantly, that the portion of Lorraine controlled by the German Empire from 1871 to 1914 was annexed because of its coal?

I guess you could dig a tunnel down the ice, into the rock surface, then make yourself a cave underneath the ice. As long as melt water doesn't get to you, then the problem is simpler, all you have to do is drill oil wells from inside this cave, separate the oil, re-inject the gas and water...and work hard to keep the shaft open. Which I guess eventually would become something like a long crack, with the older tip closing off due to the stress. Once the oil gets to the surface, you can pour it in a mold and make bricks, which can be flown out. Take the bricks to Chile, melt them, and pour oil into tiny 1 oz bottles, and then sell those as souvenirs - "Oil from Antarctica". Now all we need is some sort of tax subsidy to make it work.